WARNING: The following contains spoilers for NCIS Season 18, Episode 16, “Rule 91,” which aired Tuesday on CBS.
Shots ring out in the opening seconds of the NCIS season finale. Bishop, McGee and Torres are in a warehouse defending themselves against three assailants who are using much bigger weapons than what the agents are carrying. McGee yells that they should wait for their inbound back-up, but Bishop is pinned down with only two rounds left. With no other choice, she tells the others to cover her while she makes a move. Against their better judgment, McGee and Torres lay down cover fire as Bishop runs, slides and fires her last two rounds, killing two of the shooters as the third makes his escape.
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The next morning, Torres and Bishop have to explain to Director Vance why their undercover gun buy turned into a firefight. Somehow the smugglers figured out that they were cops and opened fire, leaving the agents forced to defend themselves. Vance accepts the explanation, but he’s unhappy with the fact that the third assailant escaped because, supposedly, he’s the brains of the operation. As they are discussing this, McGee shows up and tells them he’s successfully tracked down a landline address by using a burner phone from one of the two victims.
The three of them go to investigate the stash house but find it empty. Only by locating the landline phone jack do they find the entrance to a nearby crawlspace. Inside, there are lots of large guns, but there is also something else: classified NSA documents from a case from over ten years ago.
Back at NCIS, the team learns that the classified paperwork was from an NSA operation where they used Syrian refugees to lure Al-Qaida terrorists into the open. The file is not something that the NSA would want to be leaked, so someone is clearly trying to make a statement by planning to release information about the secret operation. Special Agent Knight, the lone bombing survivor from the last episode, happens to overhear this update and offers her assistance. She has some contacts at the NSA and says she will see what information she can dig up about the leaked file.
After some brief investigating, Vance comes to find the team with some shocking news. The NSA has determined that Bishop was the one that leaked the case file, while she was still an analyst at the NSA, over ten years ago. Vance and Bishop have a conference call with the deputy director of the NSA, who is not happy. She says that Bishop was the only one to access that file on the day in question and is adamant that the NSA is going to charge Bishop with espionage. Thinking that Bishop must’ve been framed, Vance gets the deputy director to let NCIS review the information for themselves, but they only have twenty-four hours to do it.
Elsewhere, Gibbs and Marcie are continuing to investigate their possible serial killer. Marcie shows up at Gibbs’ house to tell him that, by making a spreadsheet, she has determined that there are exactly one hundred days between the three killings, and given the current time, there should be a fourth victim somewhere. In response, a slightly cranky Gibbs suggests expanding their search area to missing persons where bodies have not been found yet. And it’s during this exchange Gibbs reveals he’s finished his boat, but Marcie tells him it’s not done because it still needs a name.
Later, Gibbs asks for a favor from Kasie. He needs a device that will help him find a listening bug because someone has been following him, and he needs to know how that person knows his whereabouts. He does, in fact, find a bug in his basement, and then he goes to Marcie’s loft apartment. There, he finds a second bug, and the two of them act like they are done investigating the case, hoping to throw off whoever is listening.
Even though McGee and Torres are worried about Bishop, they know that the best way to help clear her name is to find the third guy from the warehouse shooting. Their first lead comes when Jimmy discovers some kind of fruit in both of the two victims’ stomachs. Kasie is able to identify the fruit as a Chinese hawthorn, which is extremely rare in the U.S. That means if they can find where the fruit is sold, their suspect list would substantially narrow.
Up in the bullpen, Nick tells McGee just how hard it is to find the hawthorn fruits. McGee tells him that Chinese restaurants might be a good place to try, but he also has other news. From everything that he can see, Bishop is the one that leaked the case file, and after doing a forensic back-search on the NSA server, he can find no evidence she was framed.
At this point, Bishop starts to act strange. First, she goes to see Gibbs, and she sees that he named his boat “Rule 91.” However, he brushes off her comment about it because he can see she’s not happy. Except, rather than being mad at Vance or the NSA, she’s upset with Gibbs. With everything happening, her prior frustration with him and his suspension seems to be boiling over. She wants an apology from him, not for what he did but for how he disappeared from NCIS without a trace and left them in the dark. However, she doesn’t get one, leaving her to ask if he’s ever coming back. Gibbs can’t give her the answer she wants, so Bishop leaves. She then heads into NCIS to see Vance, which was unexpected because everyone agreed to stay home for a couple of days. Once she gets there, she tells the director not to defend her.
McGee and Torres are shocked when they find out Bishop confessed and quit her job. They want to help her, but she doesn’t talk to them or answer her phone. They both agree to focus on solving the case, but neither of them really does that. McGee goes down to the parking lot and finds Bishop sitting in her truck. The two of them have a brief, tense conversation that raises more questions than answers. Bishop has already completely moved on from the incident because it happened years ago. She stands by her decision because filing a whistleblower complaint wouldn’t have worked. McGee is shocked by her lack of remorse and asks her, “What else don’t we know?” Shortly after, McGee goes to see Gibbs, who doesn’t have any real advice for him. He says that Bishop is “at a crossroads,” and that there’s nothing McGee can do to help her.
Back at NCIS, they are still trying to find the third arms dealer. Along the way, Agent Knight came up with the theory that the bingtanghulu had been delivered, which Kasie proves her right. She tracks down someone who ordered it with a fake ID, and Torres and Knight go to bring him in. When they get him into interrogation, McGee and Knight get him to admit to smuggling the guns and owning the stash house, but he is adamant that he’s never seen the NSA file before.
As things are starting to wrap up, Gibbs calls Bishop, who is driving somewhere, and tells her to check in with Torres. When he calls, Gibbs is driving his new boat to a lake for its maiden voyage, and before he hangs up, Bishop asks him what rule 91 means. He tells her, “You’re living it. When you decide to walk away, don’t look back.” As they finish their call, Bishop is arriving at her destination: Ziva’s cabin. There, everything is made clear: Bishop is working with Odette Malone, the former CIA agent and spy instructor. She didn’t actually leak the NSA documents, but she needed everyone to think that she had because where she was going, she needed to be a disgraced NCIS agent.
The last thing she has to take care of is Torres, but he’s tracked her down. He got to the cabin before she did and is waiting for an explanation. Bishop, however, doesn’t really have much to say. She says that the timing wasn’t her choice, but she’s ready to leave. She didn’t mean for them to get so close and that it had just happened, but there was no way for them to be together because she was leaving for a long time. After telling him, “If we worked regular 9-5 jobs, things could be different,” she kisses him and walks away.
As the episode concludes, Gibbs is on the water in his newly christened boat, looking for the body of the missing person he and Marcie tracked down earlier in the episode. They believe that the police searched the wrong side of the lake, so he is on his way to investigate the far side. However, his boat explodes, and seconds later, he’s seen swimming off. Either someone tried to kill Gibbs, or he planted the bomb so the people following him would believe he was dead. Either way, viewers will have to wait until Season 19 for more details on who planted the bomb and why.
NCIS stars Mark Harmon, Sean Murray, Emily Wickersham, Wilmer Valderrama, Brian Dietzen, Diona Reasonover, Rocky Carroll, David McCallum. NCIS Season 19 will debut this Fall on CBS.
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